


Barnacled Warship

by shellfishDimes



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - Edwardian, Gen, Homestuck Shipping Olympics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-12
Updated: 2012-06-12
Packaged: 2017-11-07 13:06:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/431516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shellfishDimes/pseuds/shellfishDimes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I'm Eridan Ampora, and I am your descendant. I've looked at the histories: I've traced my bloodline. I want to be an Orphaner. I want to learn from you. It's my hatchright."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Barnacled Warship

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the first bonus round of the Homestuck Shipping Olympics, originally posted [here](http://hs-olympics.dreamwidth.org/13513.html?thread=1727689#cmt1727689), for the genre-mixing prompt: Edwardian novel/Gothic romance. It's kind of like Troll _Jane Eyre_ , except on a boat. Ship. Whatever.

Thunder outlines his hive against the night sky. It's like everything you've ever read about and unlike anything you ever thought you would lay your eyes on. And yet, here you are, nothing but a whelk, unfit for everything but feeding off the very bottom of the ocean: you, Eridan Ampora, find yourself at the door of the hive of Dualscar, the Orphaner. 

It used to be a ship, but you can tell that it hasn't sailed the seas for many sweeps: it is deeply moored on the shoal where it stands, the three masts piercing the sky like thorns. Light glitters out of the portholes like the glowing eyes of revenants which plague Alternia in the daytime, and you wait on his doorstep, the rain lashing your wiry, poorly-dressed frame, your glasses off because there isn't a point to keeping them on when you have to wipe the rain off them every few seconds.

After what feels like an eternity, the door opens with a groan of rusted hinges. The warmth of the inside of the hive hitting your half-frozen form makes you shiver. You can't make out who it is that's standing in front of you: the light is hitting their back, and your eyesight makes it impossible to make anything out at such close quarters. All you can see is the outline of a tall troll with wavy horns and a high collar looking down at you.

"What?" an authoritative voice demands.

"I heard talk you're lookin' for a personal assistant," you say, hoping that how cold and nervous you are won't show in your voice. You put on your most charming, sly smile, ignoring the way the rainwater is trickling down the back of your shirt.

"Why would I want to hire some barnacle clinging to my ship on a night like this?" He is haughty, dismissive, and just how you imagined him. It makes your gills flare with excitement.

"Because I'm a violet blood," you say, standing your ground. "I'm Eridan Ampora, and I am your descendant. I've looked at the histories: I've traced my bloodline. I want to be an Orphaner. I want to learn from you. It's my hatchright." You brace yourself on both your feet, determined to stand here for as long as you have to. You ignore the way the rainwater squelches in your soaked through shoes when you move.

Dualscar laughs: a throaty, unkind sound. "Yes, wiggler, I can see the sign on your shirt. You're the one that the Heiress Apparent threw out like yesterday's grubsauce, aren't you?"

"If you're the one that the Condescension regards with as much attention as the sea does a jellyfish." The thing with Feferi still stings, but you aren't going to let him get to you. 

"I float along according to her whims, but she doesn't feel any loss if she rips me apart?" he asks, an edge to his voice. You regret taking your glasses off at this point, and you regret not bringing a weapon. It was extremely stupid to say what you just did, and it was even more dangerous to come with just the clothes on your back. It is entirely possible that he'll attack you for this, even though the entire kingdom knows that he was laughed out of the palace when he confessed his red feelings for the Empress.

All Dualscar does, however, is chuckle quietly to himself, nothing more than a rumble in his throat. "Sounds about right," he says. "I enjoy your lip, descendant. You can stay. Until I get bored of you, and then I'll tie you to the bowsprit and leave you to the mercy of the sun."

  


* * *

  


After that night, you work harder than you've ever worked in your eight sweeps to impress him: you scrub the decks, mop the galley, polish his collection of legendary weapons, shine his boots, get the grit out of his jewellery, file his horns, and do pretty much everything else he asks. He makes you sit on the floor of his cabin in the stern of the ship while he faces away from you, looking out through the huge window onto the sea and dictates to you his memoirs. On other nights, he locks you in the library with a small mountain of scrolls and journals and asks you to copy them out, which you do, painstakingly, until the first light of day shows on the horizon and your eyes start to water. 

You keep regular correspondence with Karkat, who pleads with you to go against your natural instincts for once in your life and not be a colossal idiot. He accuses you of having finally lost it, and calls Dualscar a self-obsessed, narcissistic megalomaniac, and then concedes to the fact that you would probably find that attractive, considering how you're growing up to be the same exact moron as your ancestor.

The ship creaks in the day; wind whistles through the portholes at night, and you get up at the crack of dusk to scrub the barnacles off the bow, your bare feet making the wood groan eerily as you walk. Once outside the hive, you make your way to the front of the ship, an empty waste receptacle and a metal scraper in hand. It is low tide, so the ship is fully exposed to the wind, and the barnacles to your mercy. You sigh heavily, sitting on the sand and, arming yourself with the metal tool, get scraping. It's dull and taxing work: after an hour you're hardly rid of half of them. You keep pausing to mop your forehead, and your shirt is stuck to your back with sweat. Frustrated with it, you pull it off your head, taking special care not to catch the fabric on one of your horns.

It takes another thirty minutes for you to notice that Dualscar is sat with his legs swinging from the bowsprit, watching you work. When you realise it, you nearly jump out of your skin, scraping your tool against a barnacle you were trying to remove. The shell cracks, leaving only the fleshy underside. You'll have to scrape it off with your claws. Dualscar laughs at your blunder. Apart from ordering you around, it's all he's been doing: laughing at the mistakes you've made, in that haughty, bored way of his, like he saw them coming.

"How old are you, wiggler?" he shouts down at you. He hasn't called you by your name once.

"I'll be nine in two perigees," you say, standing up. Sand is sticking to your trousers, but you aren't going to bend down and expose your weak spots to him in order to brush it off. 

"Will you have anything to contribute to the filial pails?" The question is so forward it makes you blush plum. Dualscar sneers. "I thought not. How do you think I can allow you to call yourself my descendant if you shame me like this? Do you really believe I will allow my bloodline to end with the likes of _you?_ "

"If I have nothing to give to the drone when it comes for me, I'll fight it," you say, clutching the metal scraper tightly in your fist. You expect him to laugh, but all he does is raise his eyebrows at you, regarding you in silence.

"Then you'd better start practicing," he points out.

He jumps down from the bowsprit and makes you spar with him for the first time right there and then. You're on your back after an embarrassingly short time, the skin on your cheek broken by the rings you never see him take off. He lets you get to your feet, and then hits you again, this time landing a punch on the side of your torso, his knuckles scraping against your gills. You clutch at your side, yowling.

"Useless!" he jeers. "Is that how you'll fight a drone?"

"I can fight!" you protest. "I can shoot a gun, give me a gun and I'll show you!"

He grabs you by the throat. He's ridiculously strong, and his grip lifts your feet off the ground. You've never fought an adult before, and you don't think your odds would be very good even if this wasn't one of the best fighters Alternia has seen. Your lungs shut down and redirect your breathing to your gills, which flutter rampantly, struggling to draw the oxygen from the air.

"A drone won't give you enough time to get a gun," sneers Dualscar. "Pathetic!"

"You hide out in a wreck on the beach and bully kids to get a sense of superiority, and you call me pathetic? That's fuckin' rich!" you spit. "Maybe I don't want to uphold our bloodline if I'm descended from such a loser!" Dualscar's sneer cracks at the edges, and then shatters altogether. He roars, throwing you to the ground. Your back collides painfully with the sand, and you clutch at your throat, coughing as the breath returns to your lungs. You see Dualscar storm away and wade into the surf. He jumps into an oncoming wave and disappears under the surface, leaving you alone and bleeding on the beach, your gills smarting, your cheek bleeding and your throat raw from coughing. 

You aren't planning to leave before you've learnt anything. You leave the waste receptacle and the metal scraper where they are, and head back to the hive. The first thing you do when you re-enter the ship is head for the gun deck. Most of the cannons have been removed to make way for weapons stands. You take a large, streamlined blue rifle, hoisting it on your shoulder, and head to the captain's cabin. You prop a chair against the door handle, hoping that it will keep him away long enough for you to arm the rifle. Heading to his desk, you catch a glimpse of your reflection in the window. You look terrible. There are circles around your eyes from lack of sleep and your hair hasn't been properly conditioned in _weeks_. The cuts on your cheek have started to scab over, and there are eggplant, finger-shaped bruises forming on your neck. You sniff irritably, running your hand through your hair. All that does is make it stick up in different angles. You direct your attention back to the desk, rattling the drawers open. You know there's something here he's keeping from you: you've heard him shuffle about here when he thought you weren't listening, and you've seen him unlock the third drawer down when he thought you weren't looking. After not managing to produce a key from anywhere, you use the butt of the rifle to smash the lock, and pull the drawer open. Inside, you find what you'd only call a notebook if you were feeling exceedingly generous: all it is, in fact, is bits of foolscap paper tied together with string, rolled up, and tied once again. You untie the first knot and open it, using the inkwell as a paperweight.

The paper is old and water damaged, but the ink has mostly withstood. As much as Dualscar likes to talk your ear off about his exploits, there are no notes in this, just sketches. There are octopi, eels, cuttlefish and squid, drawn with reverent accuracy. A narwhal takes up an entire page, its movement fluid enough that you're ready to swear it is going to swim away. Some of them have dates, and you see that they go back as far as sixteen sweeps ago. A drawing makes you pause. You think it's Feferi, but it can't be: this is one of the few dated ones, drawn sweeps before either of you were hatched. The horns and the face shape are the same, and although you've never seen the Empress in person, it doesn't take you long to figure out that it's her, except younger. She can't have been more than ten sweeps when this was made. She's looking away, as if she didn't realise someone was drawing her. She probably didn't, you think. You collapsing and expanding bladder based aquatic vascular system clenches. It's not just that she didn't care, she never even knew. 

You flick through the rest of the foolscap, finding more pictures of her: her features begin to gain more of the royal arrogance typical of her blood colour as she grows to adulthood. The last sketch is unfinished: she is looking over her shoulder, her hair pushed behind her ear. A loose strand is spilling over her clavicle, and her mouth is upturned in a quizzical smile. You doubt the Empress would ever smile like that, and Dualscar must have thought the same when he drew it: the sketch has been scrawled over with angry ink strokes. 

A bang at the door makes you look up in bewilderment. You raise your rifle, watching the doorknob rattle. There is a brief pause in which you can only hear your own panicked breathing, and then the door burst open, the chair splintering and falling to the side. Dualscar stands in the frame, hair and clothes still wet from the sea. His eyes go from you, to the rifle, to the sketches on the desk, and back again.

"Nobody has ever called me pathetic and lived," he warns. "But who are you, Eridan Ampora? You're a nobody. You don't have a single quadrant mate, you're hiveless. You didn't even get into the nautical academy because you failed your entrance test four times, until they turned you away to save yourself further embarrassment. And what do you do? You come crawling to me to teach you how to be an Orphaner, so that you can impress a little fish girl who threw you face-first out of the pale quadrant."

"No."

"No?" 

"I'm not doing this for Fef," you continue. "We've had to feed lusii to Gl'bgolyb since we could swim to keep her quiet and keep everyone alive. Everything is depending on me not to fuck this up, and _I'm not gonna_. If all the land dwellers, and everyone else, gets to die, it won't be because I fucked up. I'm going to be better than you, because I'm not going to let my quadrants rule my life." You lower the rifle from where it was pointing at Dualscar's chest, and place it gingerly next to the drawings. You walk around the table, so that there is nothing standing between you and Dualscar now. "I'm not going to fester in a relic and leech off a memory. So, thanks," you conclude, shrugging. "I guess you taught me some shit worthy of my time after all."

You go to push past him and leave the cabin, but he grabs your wrist, stopping you in your tracks. You glare at him, and he glares back. It's frightening, in a way, to see your future staring at you from his face: he looks twenty sweeps old, although you can't judge it very well, since highbloods age very slowly. He could be sixty. None of the records you've read mention a definite hatch date. He looks like you like to imagine you will one day, when you lose your wiggler blubber, grow into your lanky form and stop fucking around and put some actual muscle on your bones. You wonder how many trolls he's killed for telling him the truth. You wonder how many he let stick around long enough to be able to hear the truth from them. Neither number is one you wouldn't be able to count on the fingers of your hand, you think. You can't hate him, but it's a horrible type of pity that you feel towards him. He is both someone you're fighting desperately to become and someone you don't want to end up like.

Alarm pools in your gut as he leans closer, crashing your lips together. His other hand goes to your shoulder, and he pushes you against the doorframe, your naked back digging painfully into the wood. You open your mouth and his tongue slides against yours, and your blood pusher is hammering in your chest as he presses against you, his salt-stained, damp shirt sticking to your chest. He barely has to bend down; you're almost as tall as he is. He trails his hand down your side, fingers tracing your gill slits, and you shudder helplessly. He breaks the kiss as suddenly as he started it, leaving you flustered.

"I guess you taught me something, too," he says.


End file.
